Modern cellular receivers are increasingly being required to have location determination capabilities. Recent regulations in the United States (E-911) require that cell phones are able to provide emergency services with handset location information. In addition, if the location of the handset is known it may be able to be used for location-based marketing and provision of other services based on location indication. In order to provide communication of location information for example GPS an additional RF signal path would be required within the device. This would increase the amount of circuitry and complexity and add additional costs to introduce the features required.
EP 1213844 A1 discloses a multimode receiver and a technique to reconfigure between different operating modes. This application does not deal with the subject of introducing location determination into the receiver.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,010,270 (Ericsson) teaches a way of operating parallel devices in the receiver. This patent does not address the issue of introducing location determination into the receiver, while continuing with the original tasks required by the receiver.
One object of the present invention is to provide a method and apparatus that overcomes at least some of the problems associated with the prior art and allows location information, such as GPS, to be integrated into a receiver without increasing the number of RF signal path required.